Cover Story

Taylor Swift’s Telltale Heart

AMERICAN BEAUTY Taylor Swift, photographed at the Château de Voisins, in Saint-Hilarion, France.

The very openness that helped make Taylor Swift a record-breaking pop-country idol has turned into a double-edged sword. After baring her heart in hit songs, the 23-year-old musician now finds her love life—or some distorted version of it—treated as a joke. During a girls-night-in at Swift’s Nashville apartment (the one with the indoor koi pond), Nancy Jo Sales hears about the real thing.

At the Golden Globes this year, after mutually losing out for best actress in a comedy series to Lena Dunham of Girls, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler mounted the stage with drinks in hand, making light of their disappointment by appearing bitter and drunk. “Everyone’s getting a little loose now that we’re all losers,” Poehler joked. “Congratulations, Lena,” said Fey. “I’m glad we got you through middle school.” The camera cut to Dunham shaking with laughter and clutching her gold statuette. “It’s getting sloppy in here, everybody,” Fey went on. “Look at how drunk Glenn Close is.” Close played along, simulating delirium tremens. And then: “You know what, Taylor Swift,” said Fey, shaking a finger. “You stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son.”

The joke wouldn’t have worked without the audience being aware of Swift’s highly scrutinized romantic life, the stuff of tabloid obsession. The 23-year-old music mega-star has dated some of the entertainment world’s most visible bachelors (Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Joe Jonas), only to write chart-topping songs about how they allegedly broke her heart—or she theirs. She made $57 million last year and has become one of the best-selling female recording artists in music history, all while gaining sweet revenge. So the zinger hit home, and the audience exploded with laughter, and, as if it were middle school all over again, some went “Ooooooh.”

“Or go for it, or go for it,” Poehler interjected as the camera cut to a grinning Michael J. Fox (whose handsome 23-year-old son, Sam, was this year’s “Mr. Golden Globe”). “No,” said Fey. “She needs some ‘me’ time to learn about herself.” That got another big laugh. In gossip news that week: Swift had allegedly been left by Harry Styles, the then 18-year-old lead moppet of the British boy band One Direction and her boyfriend of a few months.

Swift, who had also lost that night, for best original song (she was nominated along with John Paul White, Joy Williams, and T Bone Burnett for “Safe and Sound,” from The Hunger Games), to Adele (who won for “Skyfall,” from the James Bond film), was in the ladies’ room at the time. So she didn’t hear the sound of everybody who was anybody in Hollywood laughing at her for allegedly having her heart broken all over again. It was the kind of thing that happens in a Taylor Swift song: nice girl gets made fun of by mean girl while powdering her nose, then goes home and writes a song about it—which becomes a No. 1 hit.

When asked by Access Hollywood a week later if she was afraid that Swift would write a song about her, Fey said, “I hope so. I would love it!” And maybe she will. When we were discussing that moment at the Golden Globes, and mean girls in general, Swift just smiled and said, “You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved”—from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright—“that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’ ”

On a cold February day in Nashville, Swift was at SIR Studios rehearsing for the current 47-city tour to support her album Red (2012). Down a long hallway decorated with hanging guitars and a neon picture of Dolly Parton was the large garage-like space where Swift was practicing the song “I Knew You Were Trouble”—No. 2 that week on the Billboard Hot 100—with her six-piece band. Swift writes perfect pop songs that stick in your head like lollipops stuck in your hair. After I listened to her perform the song once, it stayed in my brain for days as if it had been implanted there by diabolical Russian scientists. It was a song about a guy—a rotten guy who had loved her and left her cold. “Trouble! Trouble!” Swift spat. All over the Internet, bloggers and fans were reading the tea leaves Swift puts in her liner notes providing clues about the identity of the guy who had left her “lying on the cold hard ground” this time.

Swift is sometimes criticized for the thinness of her voice, but it sounded sweet and melodic, with a bit of country twang. She was strumming on a Taylor guitar (she favors the brand) inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When the song was done she came running over and embraced me as if I were her long-lost aunt. (She’s known to be a hugger.) “Hi, I’m Taylor!” she exclaimed. She’s a tall (five feet ten inches), slight girl with curving blue-jean-blue eyes and full Kewpie-doll lips. Her hair, which she sometimes dyes platinum and wears crimped, was a honey gold and hanging straight. She was wearing salmon corduroys, a pale-pink button-down, black socks, and frumpy lace-up shoes.

Swift cultivates a gawky adorkability in her music videos, in which she often plays the unloved girl alone in her room pining over the cute guy. The bio Swift’s publicist had sent me was adorkable too: “Hi, I’m Taylor. I love the number 13. I was born in December on a Christmas tree farm”—actually a hospital, in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1989. Swift spent her early childhood on a Christmas-tree farm in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in a picturesque house owned by her parents, Andrea, who had worked in finance, and Scott, then a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch. “My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love,” her bio went on. “Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.”

Watching her rehearse that day, it became clear that Swift works incredibly hard. While her band—which she commands in a friendly, laid-back way—was taking a break, she continued practicing, playing songs on her guitar and piano, and going over sound issues with her soundman. “I’m the type of person, I have to study to get an A on the test,” she would tell me later. “I have to work really hard to get the record deal—I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.”

Her determination has paid off. The Taylor Swift triumphant music stats can go on and on, but here are a few: She’s a seven-time Grammy winner and the youngest person ever to win Album of the Year (for Fearless,™ in 2009). She’s the only female artist, and the fourth artist ever, to twice have an album (Red and 2010’s Speak Now) sell a million copies in its first week. With Red, she became the first artist since the Beatles—and the only female artist ever—to have three consecutive albums spend six or more weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. She has sold more than 26 million albums and 75 million song downloads worldwide. She holds the Billboard record for the most Top 10 debuts in the history of its Hot 100.

At a time when the music industry is notoriously in disarray, Swift is selling albums like it’s 1979. “She’s one of the few genuine rock stars we’ve got these days, with a flawless ear for what makes a song click,” said Rolling Stone. Neil Young has called her “a great writer.” Kris Kristofferson said, “She blows me away.” Stevie Nicks—defending Swift after their disastrous live duo at the 2010 Grammys, in which Swift sounded pitchy—compared her songwriting to Elton John’s and Neil Diamond’s.

And then there are the inevitable endorsements. Swift is a brand. She’s been called “America’s Sweetheart”: she rarely drinks, doesn’t smoke, go clubbing, or get arrested—she’s the anti-Lohan, and this squeaky-clean image has made her an attractive advertising partner for Target, Sony, CoverGirl, Keds, Elizabeth Arden, and, recently, Diet Coke.

But something happened to Swift’s long media honeymoon sometime over the last year. Suddenly people—and not just haters on the Internet but public figures—were making fun of her. It started with Ellen DeGeneres’s good-natured ribbing every time Swift appeared on her show and then progressed to the 2012 Country Music Awards (Swift has won 15 C.M.A.’s, by the way), at which hosts Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley mocked Swift’s summer romance with Kennedy-family scion Conor Kennedy, 18. “Are they ever gonna get back together?” Paisley asked. “Never, ever, ever,” Underwood replied, referencing another one of Swift’s No. 1 hits off Red, the maddeningly catchy “We Are Never Getting Back Together.” “Like, never.”

The week I went to Nashville, there was a story in The Star headlined taylor swift: laughingstock. It ran with a picture of Swift weeping, which she told me was actually taken at an event where she was singing for children with cancer.

After the rehearsal was over, Swift drove me to her apartment in her Lexus S.U.V. She admitted she was nervous, as the last time she had a reporter in the car (Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone), she had two minor accidents. On the same day. She also told me she didn’t trust reporters, ever since she caught one (a female) rifling through her purse. But we arrived at her apartment building without incident. It was a high-rise in midtown Nashville, which Swift said she had dreamed of living in when she saw it being built several years ago. “I told my mother, I’m going to live there someday,” she said. “It just looked so grown-up.”

Her bodyguard, a stalwart Tennessean, rode up with us in the elevator; he’d been following us in his car. Swift has a 24-hour security detail. “It’s because of the guys who write and say they want to chain me up in their basements,” she said. “One was in California and drove all the way to Nashville and tried to get into this building.”

The moment you walk into Swift’s giant penthouse, you know she isn’t faking it with all those love songs about high-school heartbreak and dreaming of the perfect guy. She really is that romantic. She may just be the girliest girl in America. Her foyer is covered with frames of brightly colored paper flowers; inside, you’re greeted by a six-foot topiary rabbit. There are antique birdcages everywhere and mobs of crocheted throw pillows. There’s a koi pond in the middle of the living room, whose 20-foot windows look to the Great Smoky Mountains beyond Nashville.

“Meredith is scared of the fish,” Swift said. Meredith was the little Scottish Fold (named after Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy) strolling around, mewing, looking like the Cheshire cat. I asked Swift what she would call her style. She said, “Tim Burton-Alice in Wonderland-pirate ship-Peter Pan.” She collects old bottles, antique books, and precious little knickknacks. In her bedroom, in which everything was white and fluffy, she had a copy of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow (2005), by Elizabeth Lesser.

“I have no social life,” she told me as she gave the tour. But it seems she does have a lot of friends. Along the stairwell leading up to her apartment’s second level, where she keeps her gleaming 1913 Steinway piano, were framed photographs of Swift with her inner circle: actresses Emma Stone and Selena Gomez; Caitlin Evanson, the fiddle player in her band; Hayley Williams, of the indie band Paramore. “I need to have pictures of people I love everywhere,” Swift said.

There were pictures of her posing with her heroes James Taylor (whom she was named after; her mother was a fan) and Kris Kristofferson. “That’s my boss,” she said of a picture of Scott Borchetta, the president and C.E.O. of the Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group, who signed her to his newly formed label in 2005 and is widely credited with mapping out her strategy for global domination. Swift was just 14 when she persuaded her mother and father to move the family to Nashville from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania (an affluent suburb of Reading), where they had lived since she was 9, so she could pursue a career in country music like her hero Faith Hill. (Her father transferred to the Nashville office of Merrill Lynch.)

She also had a framed photograph of that moment at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech for best female video (for “You Belong with Me”) to cry, “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” Lots of things seem to happen to Swift at awards shows. She wrote a song about that, called “Innocent” (2010). “You’re still an innocent,” she reassured West in the lyrics.

The incident wound up looking bad for him, good for her. “He’s a jackass,” President Obama said of West in a candid moment. But now Swift is the one who’s on the receiving end of some negative press, and it seems to be really bugging her.

We had dinner—chicken sandwiches and lavender lemonade ordered in from one of her favorite spots—at her dining table, which sits cozily alongside her open kitchen. She kept using the word “situation”—she spoke of a “drama situation” and a “guy situation”—and I asked her if “situation” was now a “thing.” “Could I be paving the way for ‘situation’?” she joked. “I think so,” I said. “This situation is amazing,” she said. She was funny.

And then our conversation turned to the Golden Globes. “I was just sort of like, Oh well, you know, I can laugh at myself,” Swift said. “But what it ended up adding to was this whole kind of everyone jumping on the bandwagon of ‘Taylor dates too much’—which, you know, if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people.” Conor Kennedy and Harry Styles. “And the fact that there are slide shows,” she said, “of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with but I apparently was, quote unquote, ‘linked’ to them—it’s just kind of ridiculous.”

It probably doesn’t help this situation that Swift writes songs about the guys she dates and then sends her fans on scavenger hunts to find out who they are. While some women are content to just leave an angry voice-mail message or throw the guy’s clothes in the street, Swift lets the whole world know he’s been a heel. After dating former Disney star Joe Jonas in 2008, she publicly announced he’d broken up with her in a 27-second phone call. (He said she hung up on him.) She then allegedly wrote several songs about their breakup, including “Better than Revenge,” released in 2010 (in which she says of the young woman who stole him away, “She’s an actress, whoa / She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress, whoa”). And then there was Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner, whom Swift also dated in 2009 after meeting him on the set of Valentine’s Day (2010), in which she had a small role as a boy-crazy girl, and about whom she allegedly wrote the apologetic breakup song “Back to December,” released in 2010 (“You gave me all your love, and all I gave you was good-bye”).

Then there was bluesy rock musician and former Jennifer Aniston beau John Mayer, whom Swift dated in 2009 and 2010 and about whom she allegedly wrote the scathing “Dear John” (“Dear John, I see it all now that you’re gone / Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?”). Mayer told Rolling Stone, “It was a really lousy thing for her to do.” And then there was real actor Jake Gyllenhaal, whom she dated in 2010 and about whom she allegedly wrote the song “All Too Well” (“But I’m not fine at all”).

“I’m sick of the tabloids’ saying I obsess over guys,” Swift told me. “Why would you obsess over guys? They don’t like it.”

It’s ironic that Swift, who has often spoken of having lived through a miserable middle-school experience in Wyomissing, where she was ostracized for being different—an “awkward,” temporarily overweight girl who sang the national anthem at professional sports events—now finds herself at the center of a celebrity culture infused with all the meanness of junior high. The source of her appeal has always been her ability to dig deep into her youthful feelings and reveal them in all their painfulness. One of her most moving songs, “Fifteen” (2009), is a ballad about the vulnerability of a girl at the edge of maturation.

But something else has driven her to the top of the charts, and that, of course, is her willingness to play peekaboo with the tabloids, to discreetly gossip about her exes—and herself. In an era in which the gossip business has exploded like a mushroom cloud, it’s actually a rather brilliant marketing move. That doesn’t mean it was conscious—Swift is, after all, a product of this era too; she calls herself an “Internet baby.” But she has sometimes seemed to get a little jolt out of knowing that the people who have been mean to her are getting their just deserts.

She said in a 2008 interview in The New York Times that “every single one of the guys I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans”—in those days she was talking about non-celebrity guys. (Famously, she was one of the first country artists to use the Internet to promote her work, thereby tapping into a previously unacknowledged market for the genre: teenage girls. Her crossover into pop music occurred almost immediately, as her songs proved popular on both pop and country radio stations.) And then, last year, on The View, she smirked a bit as she told the lady hosts of how she sometimes gets complaining e-mails from the outraged ex-boyfriends she has skewered musically.

“I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon,” Swift said as we sat drinking our lavender lemonade. “I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up. When I write songs it’s never a conscious decision—it’s an idea that floats down in front of me at four in the morning or in the middle of a conversation or on a tour bus or in the mall or in an airport bathroom. I never know when I’m gonna get an idea and I never know what it’s gonna be.

“Everybody in these tabloidy gossipy blogs,” she said, “they think they have you pegged, like ‘Taylor’s boy-crazy.’ And it’s why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character.

“I’m work-crazy,” Swift went on. “That’s the thing that I’m crazy about, that I don’t stop thinking about, you know? I think they need to make up these angles because my actual personal life doesn’t have a shocking angle to it: I go to work. I come home. I occasionally go out with my friends. I occasionally go on dates. ‘She’s 23! She occasionally dates! She goes out to dinner with her friends sometimes!’ No one’s gonna click on that. They’re only gonna click on it if they ask some ludicrous question that isn’t slander because it’s got a question mark at the end of it.”

“Is Taylor Swift boy-crazy?” I asked.

She smiled. “For a female to write about her feelings,” she said, “and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

She has a point. Joe Jonas is no stranger to dating (Camilla Belle, Ashley Greene, Demi Lovato), nor is Jake Gyllenhaal (Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst) or John Mayer (too many to list). Even Harry Styles, who’s only 19, has been seen around with plenty of girls (and older women, including 33-year-old British TV presenter Caroline Flack). But nobody calls them the kinds of names that get thrown at Swift. “They’re ‘playboys,’ ” Swift says wryly. “They’re ‘having fun.’ ”

She won’t go into personal details about any of her relationships—it’s one of her rules—but she does authorize someone who knows her well to discuss them with me. The fact that this information—once the purview of Seventeen and Tiger Beat—now counts as actual “news” is perplexing, but here we go:

Swift’s friend said that the Styles situation is completely misrepresented in the media. This young woman claimed that Styles “chased” Swift for a year: “He wore her down.” And then, last spring, she said, there was a weekend “where they got really close, and he was all, like, ‘You’re amazing—I want to be with you. I want to do this.’ ” Soon after that, when Styles was on tour in Australia with One Direction, he allegedly texted Swift to alert her to a picture of himself on the Internet “kissing a friend good-bye,” but said, “It’s no big deal.” When Swift searched online for the picture, however, she found that they were “making out like with their hands all up in each other’s hair.”

A rep for Styles, Benny Taranti at Columbia Records, called all of Swift’s friend’s claims “undeniably false.”

Swift ended the relationship, continued her friend, after which Styles allegedly pursued her for the better part of a year, professing his devotion and promising never to stray again. “So then they got back together, but the whole time she says she feels like he’s looking at every girl and thinking about hooking up with every girl.” And then, when they were in London sometime in the last few months, the boy-band balladeer allegedly “disappears one night and after that it was like he just didn’t want to keep going.” Now, said the friend, he is allegedly texting Swift “again nonstop, like ‘Where are you? Call me. Are you back?’ ”

At the Grammys in February, Swift made headlines again by seeming to reference Styles during her performance of “We Are Never Getting Back Together”: “So he calls me up and he’s like, ‘I still love you,’ ” she said with what seemed to be an English accent. “And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m busy opening up the Grammys.’ ”

I asked Swift’s friend if she found it odd that Swift’s last two relationships had been with such young men—teenagers, actually. Conor Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was just 17, technically jailbait, and a senior at Deerfield Academy when they started seeing each other last summer. The friend said that Conor was “just like a two-month thing,” and that Swift “says he was awesome,” although his youthfulness did prove to be an issue. “It was like a pendulum for her, swinging back and forth. She dated Jake [Gyllenhaal] and John [Mayer] when she was really young and they were in their 30s, and she got really hurt. So it was like ‘That hurt—this won’t hurt.’ But then it did.”

Swift’s fascination with the Kennedy clan seems to have pre-dated her brief relationship with Conor. In 2011 she told The New Yorker, “I’m just so obsessed with the whole history of J.F.K. and R.F.K.” She also said that she’d read Laurence Leamer’s 900-page The Kennedy Women. According to someone close to Swift, her parents know Rory Kennedy, Conor’s aunt, from being neighbors of hers in Malibu, and that is how Swift became acquainted with the family. And then, in January of 2012, Swift was seen with Rory and her mother, Ethel Kennedy, at the Sundance Film Festival, where Rory was debuting her documentary Ethel.

After that, Swift suddenly appeared to be in the Kennedy fold, visiting the family in Hyannis Port on the Fourth of July and sailing with them on Nantucket Sound. She and Conor were photographed kissing, and then holding hands at the gravesite of his recently deceased mother, Mary, who committed suicide in May of 2012. When Ethel Kennedy was asked what she would think of having Swift as a “granddaughter-in-law,” she said, “We should be so lucky.”

“There is a mutual-admiration society between my mother and Taylor Swift and I just love it,” Rory said in an interview at Sundance. In December 2012, Swift was presented with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award for her “dedication to advocacy at such a young age”—an honor that had previously been given to President Bill Clinton, Bono, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In the early fall, Swift was seen visiting Conor at Deerfield; he flew to see her in Nashville. The relationship seemed to have weathered the unflattering buzz around speculation that Swift was buying a house in Hyannis Port that sits just outside the six-acre Kennedy compound. Swift has never confirmed the purchase, nor has anyone else in her camp. But it still made her the target of a lot of talk in the gossip world. “Taylor Swift is a nutcase,” said the reliably uncharitable Harvey Levin on TMZ, discussing the alleged house buy. The show ran a clip of Glenn Close acting stalker-nutty in Fatal Attraction.

“People say that about me,” Swift said that night in her apartment, “that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like—that’s a thing that I apparently do. If I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me. Like that makes sense, like that’s something you should do.”

We were both laughing at the absurdity of it.

“That’s so funny,” I said, “ ’cause that does make you sound like a psycho.”

“Oh my God, you think I don’t know that?” Swift said. “O.K., one of these things I say to myself to calm myself down when I feel like it’s all too much … If there’s a pregnancy rumor, people will find out it’s not true when you wind up not being pregnant, like nine months from now, and if there’s a house rumor, they’ll find out it’s not true when you are actively not ever spotted at that house.”

It seems Swift actually did buy the house—just not because she was dating Conor Kennedy. According to someone close to the situation, Swift and her parents had been viewing the property for over a year, on the recommendation of Rory Kennedy. When Swift was growing up, her family summered in Stone Harbor on the Jersey Shore. “Taylor likes that East Coast beach thing,” said the source. So the Swifts were in the market for a beachfront property.

In November of 2012, the Cape Cod Times reported that the seven-bedroom, 4,440-square-foot 1928 Colonial at 27 Marchant Avenue in Hyannis Port had been bought for $4.8 million by a shell company identified as Ocean Drive LLC. The filing papers for the company name as its manager Jesse P. Schaudies, a lawyer in Nashville. Schaudies works for 13management—that’s Taylor Swift’s management company. (Remember? Swift “loves the number 13.”)

Schaudies did not return calls to 13management’s offices. But according to the source, the Hyannis Port house was recently sold: “It was like a house-flip. A good short-term investment.”

‘The last year of my life was so much fun,” Swift said that night at her apartment. “Being 22—oh my God, I was single and happy and carefree and confused and didn’t care,” which are almost the lyrics to another one of her songs, “22,” from Red. “And I’m still kind of that way,” she said. “Like, yeah, I’m dealing with a little bit of a chaotic media circus right now, but that’ll die down in a few weeks when people realize there’s nothing left to talk about.

“But there’s also a lesson in all this,” Swift said. She is big on lessons. “Songwriting’s, like, the final stage of me finally learning a lesson.

“I think there is a lesson in knowing that you can live your life in a way that you’re proud of and people are still gonna take shots,” she said. “And that’s not just in the world that I live in—that’s in middle school, and that’s in high school, and that’s in college, and that’s when you get your first job.” “Why you gotta be so mean?” say the lyrics to her song “Mean” (2010).

When she walks out onto the stage, Swift always takes a moment to close her eyes and just feel the love of her cheering fans. She’s a girl who loves love and wants to be in love—but she says she’s willing to wait until she gets it right. “Part of me just feels like it’s gonna be wrong until it’s right,” she said, talking in song lyrics again; this one hadn’t been written yet. “I’m perfectly happy for all my past relationships to be wrong until I find the one that’s right, because I’m very happy not having found my great love yet.

“I’m not actively looking, because you don’t find anything when you’re looking for it, but I think what I would mostly be looking for in a guy … is someone who sees me in my actual dimensions: 23 years old, five-foot-ten, people close to her call her ‘Tay,’ was really insecure in middle school. Like, a guy who wants to know the stories of who I was before this, and the things that aren’t on my Wikipedia page and the things that didn’t happen on an awards show—a guy who just wants to know the girl.

“If I could find someone who just looked at me like I’m a girl,” she said, “like a girl they want to be their girlfriend, with all my accomplishments and my criticisms, without this big cartoon character that most people see me as because they don’t know me … I just want a guy to be dating me as a girl.” She made a slurping sound with her straw. Her lemonade was finished.

“You know what I always do?” she said. “I have my sanity button that I push. I push this button that’s like ‘Stop complaining, your life’s great, stop, do not complain about this life, stop, this life is amaaaazing.’ Sanity button.”